Software development

Software development

Following our previous look at inodes, we know a typical Linux filesystem structure includes boot blocks, superblocks, inodes, and data blocks. This article focuses on the crucial role of the superblock, explaining what it is, why it's vital and what information it holds. Inode article for reference: Defining the Superblock As established, the superblock is created near the beginning of the partition (in Block Group 0) by tools like mkfs.ext4.

New in this release JDK 25 delivers sixteen enhancements that are significant enough to warrant their own JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP), including four preview features, one experimental feature, and one incubator feature. These features cover innovations to the Java language to the libraries (with two improvements specifically to security libraries), performance and runtime, and monitoring improvements. Language Innovation Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch 3rd Preview

He told InfoQ that the concept of "One Java, that runs on any platform" remains key and that while Java remains a great option for performant, scalable and maintainable applications for backend and cloud systems, there is no reason why Java developers should not be able to use the language and ecosystem they love and are skilled at to create mobile applications.

The first game from the development team is Prologue: Go Wayback, a single-player survival roguelike that tasks you with navigating worlds generated through machine-learning technology. It'll be available in early access starting November 20. Greene has stated in the past that he expects players to hate the game at first. The second planned game from the studio "aims to test limited multiplayer, maybe up to 100 versus 100 players," Greene told Eurogamer.

In the tech industry there are only a couple of things that can make engineers try something new. Either it's because we can do something faster or because we can do something cheaper,

The survey found that 57 percent of respondents spent more than $1 million on migration projects in the previous year, and those efforts ran an average of 18 percent over budget. Beyond financial strain, nearly 70 percent of technology leaders reported increased developer burnout and declining morale following major migrations. Perhaps most concerning, 75 percent said that security integrations became harder to maintain after consolidation.

"Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, says his lean original has grown roughly 50 times in size. Rather than critique today's version, Plummer took to his Dave's Garage YouTube channel to offer a window into Task Manager's scrappy origins, including the thought process behind its development, and his unfortunate decision to include his home phone number in the source code."

The economics of the software development business have always been kind of weird. Some things with software scale spectacularly, and some things scale very poorly. Pricing is always a challenge; it's hard to know when it is right. Even what, exactly, is being sold has always puzzled the best thinkers in the software business. And of course, open-source software throws a monkey wrench into the whole works.

VLC started out in 1996 as a student project at ECP - École Centrale Paris (now merged into CentraleSupélec). Libération has some of the early history. This includes some gems: French telco Bouygues offered to sponsor faster site-to-site links, if the students worked out a way to stream Télévision Française 1 over them. The students, predictably, also wanted to play Doom over the new links.

SnowConvert AI excels at static code conversion, but it still requires code extraction and re‑insertion. Hyper‑Q complements this with on‑the‑fly translation to tackle dynamic constructs and application‑embedded SQL that converters often miss,

The KDE team has decided to finally bring to life a feature that has been long requested. This feature (which was first floated nearly 20 years ago) is geared specifically toward multi-monitor setups and will change the way the desktop works for the better. This new feature is planned for KDE Plasma 6.6 and is all about workspaces. With workspaces, you essentially get multiple desktops that you can switch between to create an efficient environment.

You're working on an application. Let's call it "FooApp". FooApp has a dependency on an open source library, let's call it "LibBar". You find a bug in LibBar that affects FooApp. To envisage the best possible version of this scenario, let's say you actively like LibBar, both technically and socially. You've contributed to it in the past. But this bug is causing production issues in FooApp today, and LibBar's release schedule is quarterly.

The Microsoft 365 Developer team has announced the release of Dev Proxy v1.3.0, introducing several new features aimed at improving debugging, testing, and API monitoring. The update includes two new plugins, HAR file generation for standardized network tracing and OpenAI usage tracking for better visibility into AI-related costs, along with enhancements to permissions analysis, OpenAPI specification generation, and overall stability.

The approach is detailed in a paper authored by MIT's Eagon Meng and Daniel Jackson, titled "What You See is What it Does: A Structural Patten for Legible Software". They flag up the problem of "illegible" modern software, which lacks "direct correspondence between code and observed behavior". Modern software is often, also, "insufficiently modular" they continue, "leading to a failure of three key requirements of robust coding": incrementality, integrity, and transparency.

Testing MCP solves this by giving AI assistants live access to your test environment: AI sees actual page structure (DOM), console logs, and rendered output AI executes code directly in tests without editing files AI knows exactly which testing APIs are available (screen, fireEvent, waitFor, etc.) You iterate faster with real-time feedback instead of blind guessing View live page structure snapshots, console logs, and test metadata through MCP tools. No more adding temporary console.log statements or running tests repeatedly.

JFrog (NASDAQ: FROG) stunned investors with a blowout third quarter that sent shares soaring more than 24%. The DevOps platform provider not only delivered its eighth straight beat on both revenue and earnings but also showcased accelerating cloud adoption, record profitability, and a growing foothold in AI-driven software delivery. Here are three key takeaways from the results and management's commentary.

Uber has redesigned its Apache Pinot query architecture to simplify execution, support richer SQL, and improve predictability for internal analytics workloads. The previous Neutrino system, which layered Presto and Pinot, has been replaced by a lightweight proxy called Cellar and uses Pinot's Multi-Stage Engine Lite Mode. The redesign aims to reduce complexity, enforce execution limits, and provide stronger isolation for multiple tenants.

In the span of just over a year, Citizens has redesigned its open banking API, reimagined student banking, and launched a modular commercial credit card for the middle market. Each move targets a different segment - firms and their developers, students, and midsize firms - but the pattern is hard to miss: Citizens is learning to behave less like a traditional bank and more like a financial infrastructure company.

Two years after clinching 1 BTC in a national competition of Bitcoin meetups at Bitcoin 2023, the Tampa Bay Bitcoin Meetup -now formalized as the nonprofit Bitcoin Bay Foundation-has channeled the prize into a thriving local ecosystem. Valued at roughly $25,000 to $30,000 at the time, that bitcoin has appreciated to over $100,000 amid bitcoin's bull run, bootstrapping workshops, conferences, and community events that onboard businesses to the Bitcoin standard.

Famed mathematician, cryptographer and coder Daniel J. Bernstein has tried out the new type-safe C/C++ compiler, and he's given it a favorable report. The modestly titled Notes by djb on using Fil-C doesn't sound like much, and indeed, the introduction is similarly modest: I'm impressed with the level of compatibility of the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler Fil-C (filcc, fil++). Many libraries and applications that I've tried work under Fil-C without changes, and the exceptions haven't been hard to get working.

For Andrew Wang, a 33-year-old software engineer, AI has become a part of his daily routine - but it's come at the cost of some of the casual conversations he used to have with colleagues. Wang said the growing reliance on large language models has, at times, made teams feel more "siloed." In the past, coworkers would regularly hash out ideas and design options in impromptu conversations, he said. Now, much of that back-and-forth happens with AI instead - leaving formal meetings for design or code reviews.